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Lieder und Gesänge I, Op 27

Recordings

Schumann’s songs are among the greatest musical achievements of the nineteeth century, and this is the perfect release with which to mark the composer’s 200th birthday. This marvellous collection comprises Schumann’s complete songs, presented for ...» More

'An unqualified success … a glorious interpreter, warm-voiced and wholly in sympathy with the task in hand. The famous cycle Frauenliebe und Lebe ...'The care that has gone into the literary and musicological side of the project is perfectly matched by the musical results. Banse proves to be a wond ...» More

'Recorded sound is impeccable and Johnson's notes are, as always, a joy in and of themselves. Necessary for collectors of this edition, and for the Sc ...'This probing, absorbing account of Schumann's op.24 Liederkreis is as good as any you're ever likely to hear' (Fanfare, USA)» More

This song is one of the earliest to show Schumann’s interest in what might be termed a musical style for children, and his ability to enter into a realm where childhood simplicity and wonder are written into his music. There is something about the melody, as well as the poem (despite the intended depths of Hebbel’s allegories) which suggests youthful voices piping and lisping in communal song. And what parent is not moved to hear the sound of bird-like voices, particularly if they belong to his own chicks before they have left the nest? Even the accompaniments in works of this kind seem geared to a child-like technical proficiency. Schumann had already written Kinderszenen, the piano pieces about childhood which should be played by adults, but it was not until the end of the 1840s, and the experience of having children of his own, that he was to write music which seems simplified for younger hands, voices and minds. However, in case one were tempted to regard Schumann as a musical educationalist, a Kodály or Hindemith for example, the composer simply seems to have been exploring, with great relish, that side of his own imagination which was to remain forever child-like. In other words, his children’s music, for the most part, seems written for himself. In his desire to re-visit those realms of Never-Never Land he idealises childhood in a way that suggests his own anguish at passing from that state. In the same way he lauds the idea of marriage (in works like the Rückert Liebesfrühling and Minnespiel settings) long after his day-to-day relationship with Clara had ceased to be happily uncomplicated. The importance of such aspects of happy family life was also part of the Zeitgeist. The celebration of these two cornerstones of respectable life – marriage and children – places the composer firmly within his bourgeois epoch. Indeed, these preoccupations separate the emotional worlds of Schumann and Schubert.

What Schumann does have in common with Schubert, however, is an ability to write tunes which seem as natural and as enduring as folksong. The accompaniment doubles the melody as if gently nudging uncertain young singers into the correct melodic grooves. But having sung through the melody once, we have learned it and are ready to repeat it in best folksong manner. In fact the first three strophes are identical, and the question-and-answer phrases suggest the schoolroom divided into two choirs. It is, however, part of Schumann’s genius to change hymn-like music that would be foursquare and dull in other hands into something genuinely touching and heartfelt. His melodies in this vein do not suggest the hopeless pedantry of the educational system of the time; rather do they seem to encapsulate deeply felt seriousness about even the little things of life which was one of the German qualities most admired by the Victorians – although it is difficult to imagine a lesson on bird migration given in this fashion at an English public school.

For the third strophe the adult composer, in the guise of father narrating a bedtime story, brings the song to a happy-ever-after conclusion. The bird is at last freed to fly outside the confines of the home key of C major, moving in sequences into dominant, subdominant and supertonic harmonies before happily returning to home base. The accompaniment flutters in right-hand triplets as the roving left hand navigates the twists and turns of flight. ‘Linde Luft’ prompts an ambitious arpeggio heavenwards, but this hardly disturbs the essentially modest and simple relationship between voice and piano. Eric Sams avers that this may be an early example of Schumann’s song-writing, pre-dating 1840. If so, it is astonishing how a young composer, renowned for his virtuosic keyboard writing in the 1830s, was able to rein-in his pianistic exuberance for the sake of the mood of a poem. But this sensitivity to literature, and a willingness to be guided by his poets, lies at the heart of Schumann’s genius as a composer of Lieder.

Till a’ the seas gang dry my dear,
And the rocks melt wi’ the sun,
And will luve thee still, my dear,
While the sands o’ life shall run.

And fare thee weel, my only luve!
And fare thee weel a while!
And I will come again, my luve,
Though it were ten thousand mile.

Robert Burns (1759-1796)

Earlier in these commentaries I made an observation about differences between the songs of Schumann and Wolf; the latter composer seems to inhabit his poets completely, finding a different style for each of them. In comparison, the Schumann settings of Heine, Kerner, Chamisso and so on seem less differentiated by the tone of the poet’s voice than the composer’s. But when one listens to this rosy little gem there is no doubting that Schumann approaches Robert Burns in a special way. This folksong style runs like a rustic seam through Myrten where there are eight Burns settings in all (Hyperion Schumann Edition Volume 7). Once again we hear a heartfelt simplicity in this stray setting, Schumann’s farewell to the poet in terms of solo song (there are later choral works). The poet’s farewell to his beloved in the final strophe of Dem roten Röslein gleicht mein Lieb’ clearly ruled the song out for inclusion in the wedding sentiments of Myrten.

The poem was written in 1794, and published in Johnson’s Museum in 1796. Burns was a man of the eighteenth century, one of Schumann’s few non-contemporary co-authors. The Scot was a master of folksong, renowned for his integrity and good-heartedness, as well as for his laddish leanings to the ladies and strong liquor. At the same time he was a literary genius sans pareil; even Goethe recognized this. Would the musical poet from Ayr (a great folksong collector) and the poetic composer from Zwickau have become friends if they had met? Yes, certainly, if the musical evidence is anything to go by.

It is beyond me how a Saxon composer is able to make this music sound so Scottish. Perhaps Schumann knew Beethoven’s folksong settings, perhaps the ghost of a Scotch snap goes a long way in setting an atmosphere. Mendelssohn, that seasoned connoisseur of the Hebrides, must also have been influential – perhaps in terms of verbal, as well as musical, enthusiasm. But there is a further link here, a shared Protestantism; we can imagine the Kirk resounding with the austere beauties of the Bach chorales (Burns would have found them enthralling). The composer shows the greatest restraint in terms of harmony: the shyly deferential way that the vocal line dips like an eighteenth-century bow (a change from the tonic to the yielding subdominant in the three opening notes of the song) strikes an authentic note. Schumann seems instinctively to have understood the poet’s essential qualities as a writer of love lyrics, even if the translations he uses are not perhaps the best available, even then, to the German reader. Everything here is scrubbed clean of oily European charm, and stripped of spurious effectiveness. All is musical thrift and understated honesty.

It is a song with which (in my experience) few continental singers feel in tune: the most famous of these steam-rollers through Schumann’s ‘Andantino’ with a superficial and jolly ‘Allegro’, oblivious to the nostalgia and shy sweetness at the song’s heart. No-one who treasures the original poem for the beautiful and immortal thing that it is can approach this music with anything other than a respectful temerity – in the same way in which the poem’s protagonist, cap in hand, declares his eternal devotion. It is very unusual for an English-speaking background to be an advantage for interpreters of lieder, but that is the case here.

This is another orphan song, seldom performed, although this time to a text by a favourite poet. It is clearly not part of the famous Frauenliebe und -leben, and neither is it a substantial ballad like Die Löwenbraut or Die rothe Hanne. Its date of composition suggests that Schumann might have toyed with the idea of including the song in Myrten, but the subject matter was not really suitable for that wedding present in song, an extended homage to lovers across the ages. And yet the poem itself surely awoke autobiographical echoes in the composer. The age gap of nine years between Robert and Clara seems unproblematic in hindsight, but it was enough of a difference for the eighteen-year-old Schumann to have been sexually active elsewhere at the same time as the nine-year-old Clara revered her father’s new piano pupil with what might be termed a schoolgirl crush. The dawning of the romance, the moment when Robert perceived ‘little Clara’ as a highly attractive young woman, a fitting object of desire, might have prompted exactly the range of confused feelings expressed in this poem—a questioning as to the appropriateness of a relationship across the age barrier. He might have shivered a little (as the poem describes) in realizing that what had been unthinkable had suddenly become his destiny. As the older man he no doubt felt an acute sense of responsibility.

When Chamisso wrote the poem he was no doubt describing his feeling at the age of thirty-eight in marrying a girl less than half his age, and whom he had also known from her childhood. Of course Robert was no grey-headed senior citizen, and neither was Chamisso. (The line ‘Du heissest mich reden’ is a reference to Mignon’s lyric where a young girl keeps her devotion to Wilhelm Meister, an older man, a secret; here the roles are reversed.) There is a measure of irony in the poem that has a grave humour of its own, and Schumann was aware of this courtly exaggeration—‘do you really want to marry an old man like me?’ The versification of the poem, two lines to a strophe, suggests a kind of winded exhaustion, the breathlessness of an embattled veteran. The four-bar prelude (the tempo marking is Sehr langsam) seems a musical metaphor for ‘downhill all the way’, but it does manage a wistful moment at the end as if turning around to check, for one last time, whether the girl really wishes to carry on with this relationship. The use of the word ‘gesund’ at the end of the third strophe must surely be significant. The girl’s beauty is only hinted at by her clearness of eye and redness of her mouth; what is emphasized is that she is young and healthy; this becomes a climactic point of the song with a meaningful fermata and chord change. Schumann was continually worried about his mental health, and had contracted syphilis in his late teens.

The music is hardly Schumann’s most original, its lugubriousness was surely meant to tease Clara than to pose any serious questions regarding their impending marriage. It expresses devotion in a curiously wry manner, and without any memorable melodic distinction. The factor that seems to unite the five songs of Op 27 is their simplicity. It may be that the composer wished to group together songs that were easy and accessible for both singer and pianist.

Green is the jasmine shrub
at rest in the evening,
but when with the morning
light stikes it
it becomes as white as the snow:
“What affected me in the night?”
See, it happens to the tree
which dream in the spring.

The jasmine bush was green
As it fell asleep last night,
When woken by the morning breeze
And sunlight,
It was snowy white:
“What happened to me overnight?”
That, you see, is the fate of trees
Who dream in spring!

Jasminum officinale – known as ‘poet’s jasmine’ – with its shining green leaves and white flowers is native to Iran and is the source of the attar of jasmine used in perfumery. We may assume that this is the flower meant by the orientalist Rückert. Although it is an ornamental shrub which blooms in summer, the song itself is redolent of the gentle perfume of spring, the season suggested by the poem. The piano writing is as shyly fragile as the fronds of greenery which weave their way through the stave; these are connected (by an occasional leap of the left hand) to the earthiness of the bass, but the piano writing is free of the dark heaviness of the soil. At first all is light and joy. To listen to this song in a matter of seconds is like watching a speeded-up nature film; the overnight progress of the jasmine from green leaf to white flower is accomplished in a matter of seconds by the audible stirrings of the lissom semiquavers, an analogue for the incessant workings of nature. We literally hear the rising sap. It is perhaps the nearest thing we have in song to a musical enactment of Goethe’s celebrated poem Die Metamorphose der Pflanzen (‘The Metamorphosis of Plants’) when the poet writes ‘Werdend betrachte sie nun, wie nach und nach sich die Pflanze / Stufenweise geführt, bildet zu Blüten und Frucht’ (‘Consider the plant and see how by gradual phases, slowly evolved it forms, rises to blossom and fruit.’). Schumann might have even been aware of this parallel. He noted on the manuscript that the song was only an attempt at the all-but-impossible task of capturing the stirrings of nature in musical terms.

The spring-like key of A major (also beloved by Wolf to depict the same season – and cf Schumann’s Mörike setting Er ist’s) announces the jasmine in harmonically simple fashion, gently windswept and not yet laden with its characteristic white blossom. The direction of the upwardly-wafting accompanying semiquavers is temporarily reversed in a dying fall to reflect ‘eingeschlafen’; the phrase closes with a staccato quaver in the bass, a gesture which suggests something gently nodding as it falls asleep. A change of dynamic (from piano to mezzoforte) and a move to the relative minor (F sharp minor) betokens the vigorous new light of day which arrives within a single beat. Much has happened in the intervening hours which have been completely elided by the power of music. If the jasmine plant were a human head of hair it would be the stress of life and experience that has turned it white. In its anthropomorphic role, as it asks a question as if it were a human being, there is a touch of perplexed distress in the minor tonality of the music. For a moment we might imagine that we have entered autumn or winter rather than the flowerings of spring, but what seems to be a disturbing new development is in fact an encouraging new beginning. (This brings to mind Goethe’s poem Phänomen, where the ageing poet asserts the right of the white-haired to experience love.)

At ‘Wie geschah mir in der Nacht’ (a diminished-seventh harmony unfolding beneath a repeated C natural in the vocal line) the tree asks the question as to how this remarkable change in its appearance has come to pass. The cluster of notes on the keyboard, and the resulting halo of sound caught in the pedal, suggests a bough laden with blossom and an atmosphere heavy with perfume. Rückert is very different from Goethe; he is not content to glory in the scientific aspect of plant growth. Instead he adds a fanciful codicil as if he were chiding the tree for being a dreamer and not concentrating. It should now wake up to its own good fortune; after all, it is handsomely rejuvenated. The shy cadence to which the final verb ‘träumen’ is set admirably reflects the dream-like mood that the composer has captured throughout this song. The potency of longing which seems to hang in the air brings to mind the altogether more leisurely Der Nussbaum.

The postlude is a capricious delight. A joyful upward flourish ending on a staccato note (which here signifies a dream), and an off-beat accent on a diminished chord, are matched and balanced by a further diminished chord which suggests doubt. In turn, this melts into a downward arpeggio. The equivocal situation in which the jasmine finds itself seems to be happily resolved in the concluding ripple of A major. The celebration of the tonic key seems like a smile at the tricks played on us by nature, as if to acknowledge that life brings something new and unexpected to us at every new stage of our growth and development.

This is another stray song by a poet whom Schumann set on one occasion only. It is scarcely a distinguished lyric but no composer is utterly impervious to the salon tastes of his own time. Occasionally we find even the immortal Schubert in a frame of mind to imitate the sentimentality of the currently popular musical style in order to score a quick success with the public, or a fair lady. In these circumstances it is difficult to tell sneaking parody from the occasional lapse of taste. If there is even a faintly memorable melody here, it appears to have happened by accident. In this ingratiating 6/8 rhythm the vocal line is all leaning sighs; sentimental semitones oiling the progress of the weaving quavers in their progress up the stave. As Eric Sams says, the mood of this valentine may appear agreeable to some, though it is musty by today’s standards: those chromatic clichés have long since been ruthlessly over-exploited by lesser composers.

We hardly ever hear this song today on concert programmes but it has its merits, above all in terms of the composer’s attempts to achieve a natural diction. Zimmerman’s poem is one of a set of socalled Distichon which attempt to replicate classical metre. Schumann’s attempt to translate this intractable verse-length into romantic song makes for a certain unpredictability. As a solution to the stiffness of the metre the composer tries to make the poem appear to speak for itself, as if the melodic line, such as it is, were moulded by the inflections of ordinary speech. There are no high notes for their own sake, and the ups and downs are usually confined to small intervals which mirror the emphases of the spoken language. Everything seems invented on the spot, a response to the emotion of the moment rather than artfully calculated for the sake of a tune.

It seems eccentric that words like ‘Strahl’, and the first syllable of ‘Rose’, should be set as dotted minims that take up the whole bar. The latter setting redeems itself by placing the second syllable of the word (‘Rose’) a seventh lower. This interval perfectly illustrates the act of tipping a phial of perfume in order to dispense a single drop of oil. The squeeze of the harmony on ‘Rose’ simultaneously suggests pressing of the flower. The poet declares himself restored and refreshed; he is one of the early beneficiaries of aromatherapy, even if only through a romantic metaphor. The sixbar postlude wafts as freely as fragrance lingering in the air, pleasant enough though short-lived.